Got a Plan for Improving your Organization's Maintenance Approach

All too often organization's are attempting change or improvement efforts and yet, have no formal strategy or roadmap to get there. Join Jeff Shiver as he shares insights on creating your roadmap to help you communicate and engage others to help you drive the changes.

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Hello, I am Jeff Shiver, Managing Principal of People and Processes.

I wanted to share some thoughts with you today regarding your strategic approach. Where are you actually going? What is your roadmap?

When I look at our processes within People and Processes what we do with our clients is we start with an assessment. You say, "Well what does that assessment look like?"

Well, what we do is we look at your materials management side, your CMMS, Computerized Maintenance Management, your preventive and predictive maintenance approaches, your organizational alignment and on and on and on.

Out of that we actually develop a gap analysis. We say, "OK, against the best practices where are you at? Where do you fall within this range? From that we go away and we develop a report and say, 'OK here is your information. This is where you actually fell out against the best practices.'"

But that is not really the big thing. The big thing is coming back a few weeks later and helping you put together the strategic plan of improvement, or the roadmap for moving forward. Even though you might not use us to help you do that, that is quite okay. The question for you is where is your roadmap?

Many people want to know where you are going within the organization and how are you going to get there. One of the things that we do when we do it is we put it together with a Microsoft Project timeline and I encourage you to do the same.

Most engineers, most maintenance organizations and engineering sites have Microsoft Project so you put together a task list. When I help the companies develop their task list for example, you typically have 250 line items as a minimum, so you know where are you going over the next three years within your maintenance organization.

Think about this, when you are using this communication tool with your people it helps them to understand where you are going. It helps them buy in to what you are trying to accomplish.

So many times, I hear people say, "Hey, I've got a plan."

I ask them, "Well where is it?"

"Well it is in my head."

You cannot use that to communicate with other people. Create a strategic roadmap. Figure out where you are going, put it down on paper and share it with people so they can buy in and help you get there.

I hope you enjoyed the tip. Jeff Shiver, People and Processes. Have a great day.